What is the Significance of the UX Roadmap?
UX design roadmap: What is it? What does it do? What significance does it hold? Well for starters, the UX design roadmap is a strategic rubric that aligns, prioritizes, and communicates a team’s future work and acts as a problem solver.
This read will let you know about all the essentials to the UX design roadmap which will help you to decide if this is something that your company should opt for.
Understanding UX Design Roadmapping
A UX design roadmap is like an answering scheme that students get while solving their mathematics problems. This helps them to know they’re on the right track. Similarly, the UX design roadmap helps your designers, researchers, developers, stakeholders, and even the clients/customers be on the same page.
Every UX design road map should have what’s called ‘context coupled with scope and time.’ These two key components that define the overall meaning and the purpose (use) of a roadmap.
It is of utmost importance that every UX design roadmap should consist of a scope that gives the roadmap an owner and some purpose. For example, title, day and date, high-level goals.
This gives the UX design roadmap a time frame in which the specific work will be held. Here a three horizon approach is adopted that helps in managing growth in an organized manner.
The work is jotted down in a way which is followed as:
- Immediate Future
- Near Future work
- Future work that is more than 6 months away
In accordance with this frame, themes are plotted and this is where the UX work is deployed in masses. Themes consist of 3 components:
- A beneficiary – The main recipient of the UX working
- A clear objective – Outcomes from business point of view that includes, market insight, growth, and revenue
- The ownership – The 2 Ws, Who & What, which team will complete the work and the kind of work which will be completed.
The Significance of a UX Design Roadmap:
While this roadmap might sound tedious to get around, the differences can be seen in the long run. If you’re going to the gym you’ll need a plan for the whole week so that you know which muscle group to target all six days of the week. Even though you become an experienced weight trainer, you’ll still need to perform a full-length stretch and a warm-up to begin your workout.
A UX design roadmap acts the same way. Every day when a designer starts his work he’ll revisit the roadmap, just have a read-through to gain perspective and then start his work. A roadmap gives users constant guidance as they work to improve the experience and discover new areas that might be of value for the users.
The roadmap creates transparency in a workplace, especially for stakeholders. A clarity is given as to how long the design takes for completion as well as what exactly the designer is working on.
There is a limited chance of errors when a UX design roadmap has been created that opens the pathway for successful mockup designs. This means that the command line has now been laid out for developing prototypes. We at mockup machine can fully help you from laying a roadmap to the final prototype and the best thing about this is that you will have full control over the entire process.
Properties of a UX Design Roadmap
Properties will define how a UX design roadmap will be successful. They are as follows:
1- UX Vision
When creating a UX design roadmap you should always have a clear vision in mind. This will help to define the impact which your design will have on your customer. This is where you’ll collaborate with others to get their insights on what should be in a design and how it could make a difference. What problems occurred and how this could be mitigated with your particular design. This can then be jotted down in the UX design roadmap.
2- Curated according to user research
The basic premise to a UX design roadmap is to cater the user, the end goal. Even though these road maps are only for internal use they should always be user-oriented.
3- The value addition
For a UX design roadmap, to be successful, you need to be user-focused rather than feature-focused. The value is added when the roadmap is centered on outcomes over outputs. A good product design that is user-focused always starts at home.
So the roadmap, although used internally, should always reflect ‘why would a customer want to choose your product.’ All this is in the palm of your hand, you choose what value to deliver and how your product’s user experience differs from the market competition.
4- Design Guidelines
A proper design guideline and structure is what separates a good UX design roadmap from an off-balanced one. Defining these guidelines help the designers to stay focused on quality of the design. When they’re on the computer they’ll know just how much they need to explore, bring in that creative element and how much they need to be formal in terms of design.
Inconsistencies are faced when you haven’t set these design guidelines. Think of this component of the UX design roadmap as not mandatory but it is very much needed.
The components mentioned above are those which should be a part of every roadmap. However, based on your requirements the basic components can be expanded.
Wrapping Up
There are still so many organizations in the market who consider UX design roadmap a mediocre thing. A ‘one fits all size’ is avidly followed by most of the organizations. They believe that a generic outline will do the trick.
However, it’s important to note that every design has a separate user base and by creating a UX design roadmap it will surely deliver value to the end-user because that is what matters at the end.